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The somber dream of a garrison state

By Michael Young
Daily Star staff
Thursday, August 17, 2006 <

Near the end of his speech on Monday, Hizbullah's secretary general, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, began sounding, ominously, like a president. I say ominously, because Nasrallah has not been elected president, though the current tenant of that office does make us pine for better. In outlining his vision of a stronger state, the Hizbullah leader plainly implied he intended to help reshape that state, and how else would he do so except by bending it around his own party's priorities?

On the same day there was an intriguing headline in the new daily newspaper Al-Akhbar, which, once you've worked out the intricacies of its financing and the identity of its journalists, mainly situates itself in the March 8 camp, close to Hizbullah, with some splashes of Aounism. The headline read: "A Government of National Unity, to Prevent 'Faulty Calculations.'" Given that the story cut to the national unity government idea editorially, without it being based on a specific news item or quote, it seemed more a warning than anything else.

Then on Tuesday we heard Bashar Assad effectively call for a coup d'etat against the March 14 majority. The Syrian president declared that Hizbullah should transform its military "victory" in the South into a political victory in Beirut, and accused March 14 of being the intended beneficiaries of Israel's onslaught. The Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, sensing a Syrian effort to re-impose its control over Lebanon, will hold a press conference this morning to start mobilizing the majority, which has seemed extraordinarily faint-hearted in recent weeks.

Yet March 14 should profit from Hizbullah's constraints. Unless implementation of Resolution 1701 fails and the war resumes, in the foreseeable future Hizbullah will be cut off from its vital space in South Lebanon. This doesn't mean the party intends to withdraw its men from the South or crack open its weapons caches to the Lebanese Army and the expanded United Nations force. If anything, Hizbullah seeks to empty the UN resolution of its content. And unless Prime Minister Fouad Siniora takes a firmer position in favor of a complete demilitarization of the area south of the Litani River, he risks losing his credibility at the Security Council. But there is a good possibility that one thing will change in the short term, namely Hizbullah's ability to raise and lower the temperature in the border area. Nasrallah may be declaring victory, but with hundreds of thousands of his coreligionists rebuilding their homes and lives, Hizbullah's latitude to fire at Israel, and to do so amid a UN force reflecting an international consensus, will be relatively small.

This raises the question of whether Nasrallah will compensate by turning his attention to the domestic front. If the secretary general is so keen to build up a strong Lebanese state, presumably he intends to contribute to that effort from a position of authority. So, is Nasrallah on the verge of taking that authority, flush from his tactical triumphs in the South and motivated by an understandable desire to draw attention away from the devastation inflicted on the Shiite community since July 12?

If the answer is yes, then we must consider the mechanism of a sudden accumulation of greater power. This brings us back to a government of national unity. For some time, the Aounists have regretted their decision to be an opposition party in Parliament, without power. But what they have regretted more is that Hizbullah has done nothing at all to bring them into the Siniora Cabinet. Now this may change. If there is anything explaining Michel Aoun's fresh rabidness against the government (in an Al-Akhbar interview, no less), it is that he feels, apparently like Assad, that the time is ripe to do away with the present government majority.

Nasrallah may soon agree, insisting that Hizbullah, along with the Aounists and other groups in the country, particularly those close to Syria, are entitled to more ministerial portfolios. He could justify this on the grounds that Lebanon's reconstruction demands national concord. Would Nasrallah succeed? Maybe not, because Parliament would still need to vote confidence in a new government, and the March 14 majority does not want to lose its dominance. But the pressure could mount, so that the fallback position would be to grant Hizbullah and the Aounists a third of Cabinet seats plus one, allowing them to block votes on major policy. Lurking over this would be Hizbullah's militants, angry with the majority and eager to build up a system defending the "resistance option."

That's, of course, just one scenario. There are those who will argue that Nasrallah is more cornered than his coolness suggests. He may have declared a historic victory, but Lebanon has already started focusing on the price of that victory, whether in monetary terms or in terms of unemployment, emigration, opportunity costs, investor confidence, and much else. Nasrallah's supporters might buy into his rhetoric, but businessmen won't. With a debt of some $40 billion and losses estimated at between $6 billion and $10 billion, for a GDP languishing at just above $20 billion, the shadow of a general economic collapse remains near.

Shiites would suffer as much as anyone else from such a calamity - probably worse given their current vulnerabilities. And the reality is that when international donors or investors look to Lebanon, they don't feel particularly comfortable with a political and paramilitary organization that announces its passion for martyrdom; they look to those people that Nasrallah has criticized for failing to adequately defend his choices: Siniora and the bland technocrats of the Hariri-led reconstruction era. Whatever Nasrallah and Aoun think of this reality, neither man has the credibility to put Lebanon on even a tolerable economic footing.

So, what did Nasrallah mean by a strong state? You have to imagine that he was in part thinking of his "defensive plan," whereby Lebanon would essentially ask Hizbullah to be a vanguard in facing down permanent Israeli threats. But since that plan has gone nowhere, since it effectively brought Israel back into Lebanon, Hizbullah must have a newer version in hand. But would the Lebanese go along with seeing their languid Mediterranean playground transformed into a somber garrison state?

That's where Nasrallah must be more amenable to the odd psychology of Lebanese society, all compromises and consensus and winks and nods. The Hizbullah leader is no aficionado of this. As he remarked at a May 2003 rally, Lebanon needed "great men and great leaders, not leaders of alleyways, of confessional groups, of districts." But that's who Nasrallah will have to deal with if he decides to transform the state into something stronger, and he'll have to accept that many of his countrymen don't want a stronger state if it means living in a gigantic Hizbullah barracks.

It is doubtless time for everyone to be modest, both Nasrallah and his March 14 rivals. Lebanon will fall back into civil war before it accepts the hegemony of one side over the other, before one side imposes its version of the state over that of the others. One truth stands out, though: Lebanon can no longer afford to be a playground for proxy wars, since what will emerge is not a stronger state, but no state at all.